🔗 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Things have been shit for a while. Ever since the war with Iran and its reverse proxies had started it's been all but impossible to maintain any kind of normalcy. We've been in bomb shelters so frequently and so often—and mostly at night—that sleep has been pretty hard to come by. I happened to have caught a cold on the same day the war started, and that first week I was awake with not a wink of sleep for three straight days. To get to our shelter, I have to walk down three floors, and then walk back up. Walking up and down every 30 minutes on the days I was sick was hard. On the "positive" side, it's been very easy to maintain my daily goal of climbing at least 10 floors every day. In fact, I've been averaging ~25 floors a day since the war started.

Last night was the first night I had in over a month where I had more than 3.5 hours of uninterrupted sleep, so that's good, but I don't recall being so damn tired since my basic training ~25 years ago. My brain is in a terrible fog.

A few weeks ago Iran moved from launching single-munition ballistic missiles to launching cluster-munition ballistic missiles. These warheads split into many smaller warheads—literally dozens of them—right before impact. Inside the bomb shelters, you can hear so many explosions that it almost sounds like popping corn, if popcorn could kill.

It's difficult to judge where explosions are taking place by sound alone. Sometimes an explosion is so loud you're certain it must have been extremely close, but then it turns out it was dozens of kilometers away. Some weeks ago, however, as we were sitting in our shelter during another cluster-munition missile attack, there was an explosion that sounded like it was right outside, followed by a strange metallic scraping sound. After we were given the okay to leave the shelter, maybe 10-15 minutes later, I went outside to see if there was any damage, but couldn't see any. I walked back up to my apartment and went outside to the rooftop balcony to check if there was any damage there. My balcony is located on the backside of the house and faces a family home and a kindergarten. These are on a small "dutch street", with an elementary school (which happens to be mine) on the other side of the street. Right there, between the kindergarten/family home and the school, a large group of people was crowded, many on their phones yelling "the missile dropped right here!" I could see that the roofs of the kindergarten and the family home were now caked with debris, and many of the roof tiles were broken. Our roof seemed to be okay, but we did get some debris too, mostly pieces of the dutch street's tiles.

I walked back to the street to take a look. The site of the fall was already blocked by police. The street's dutch tiles in the vicinity of the explosion seemed to have all been completely blown off, exposing the underside soil. The explosion sent one of the cars into the middle of the street—probably the metallic scraping sound I had heard—and the other cars had their windshields broken and suffered other damages. The buildings seemed to mostly be okay, but their electricity was out for a few hours.

What was really surprising is how quickly the city fixed everything up. Within a few minutes, work vehicles were on site to begin reconstruction. I went back to my balcony and watched as they worked. They even brought a steamroller and new dutch tiles, and within three hours, the street was mostly back to normal, aside for the broken cars and scattered debris on the rooftops.

With missile launches being quite frequent (and coming from multiple countries: Iran, Lebanon and Yemen), we've been inside the house for very long. Too long. Too very fucking long. I've only been to work twice or thrice in the past 5-6 weeks. I've been trying to go to the gym and take my usual 1-3 hour walks around town as much as possible. My gym is below ground and is considered a Merkhav Mugan (protected space), so being there is fine, but when you're outside, you're exposed. As such, I've basically been on a tour of my city's bomb shelters. Almost every time I go on a walk there's at least one missile alert. I've made it a point to always be in the vicinity of apartment buildings and schools where finding a bomb shelter is relatively easy, so I haven't had any problems finding a shelter every time it happened. What I did find is that no two shelters are alike. Some are small, some are large, some are very old, some are new, some buildings keep their shelters well stocked and maintained—with a TV or a radio, mattresses for sleeping, blankets, a coffee station and some snacks—while others only put up chairs chairs or nothing at all. Worse, some had unfortunately turned their shelters into neglected storage rooms.

Being on no sleep and constantly running for shelter for so long (not to mention the fact we have been at war for more than two years now) has left people on edge, quite understandably, myself included. Last week, I was driving to work when I get the alert that a missile launch was detected and that soon sirens would sound (missiles launched from Iran take a long time to reach Israel, so we are given a warning immediately when they are detected, and have between two to 10 minutes before the actual sirens will sound, which gives us about a minute to reach the shelter).

I was very close to my destination—where there's a very good bomb shelter—and figured I should make it there in time. I was maybe 400 meters away when the sirens sounded. The road I was on was a one-way narrow side road, and unfortunately, it was blocked by a car. I blew the horn and stopped right behind the blocking car. Noticing that there was no driver in the car, and that the car was stopped right near the lobby of a commercial building with a bomb shelter, I figured the driver must have run to the shelter, as well they should have. I exited my car and stepped into the building and down into the bomb shelter as well.

I waited until after the explosions sounded—maybe five minutes—and went back outside, long before we got the okay to leave, as I don't like leaving my car in the middle of roads. Surprisingly, the car that had me blocked-in was no longer there. Some dude in a yarmulke pointed to my car and asked if it was mine. I answered that it was, and he quite rudely asked me whether I was crazy or something like that. I told him the road was blocked, I had nowhere to go, but he angrily claimed that I was lying. To both his and my surprise, I yelled at him "but the road was blocked!" very loudly. I guess I was more on edge than I had noticed.

He did not like it and yelled back "who are you yelling at?" I really had no patience for that bullshit so I came right in his face and said "You. I'm yelling at you."

He didn't like that either. For a second, it looked like he was about to get physical, but he reconsidered and stepped back. Doing that, however, seemed to have made him even angrier, and he started yelling like crazy, cursing, spitting, and generally acting like a Hamas terrorist. He had lost it. I told him again, "the road was blocked, and there were sirens, what did you want me to do?" But he just kept shouting and cursing like a madman, so I decided to try and keep my cool and just walked to my car and drove off. For 5 seconds. To my original destination. Later, I took a look at my car's video recordings and noticed that the car that had me blocked-in was on top of a tow truck parked on the sidewalk near the building when I started driving away. Apparently, a tow-truck driver decided that a missile attack is a good time to start towing a car in a narrow one-way road.

This unnecessary incident has left me rattled, mostly because I regretted keeping my cool (eventually) and not punching that guy in the face, but—in my mind—I tried anyway to extend to him the same courtesy I had expected him to extend to me: Maybe he was also on edge from the war. Maybe the war had taken a toll on him as well. Maybe he was also just meters away from his destination. Maybe he exploded just like I exploded. Or maybe he's just a fucking asshole who acts and talks like a terrorist and didn't care about the missile attack at all.

So I figured I needed to get my stress levels in order and went back to doing mindfulness meditation sessions twice-daily. This is something I had been doing for almost a decade now, but I don't always keep up with it, and I hadn't for the past few months. Two days ago, on Passover Eve, I was driving to my aunt to give her some gifts for the holiday. We knew the Iranians would attack more than usual that day because of the Seder, but I thought I had a few hours before they started. I was wrong. The Iranians launched a missile attack right when I was on the highway, about halfway to my destination. It was lightly raining, and the country was also engulfed in dust from a recent dust storm, so being on the highway right next to a ditch with nowhere to take shelter wasn't ideal. Still, I kept my cool, stopped at the side of the road behind another car, hopped over the shoulder-guard and into a pool of mud, and sat in the mud with my back to the ditch wall, near the other car's driver.

Iran ended up launching five attacks in a row, so every time we thought it was over and we could go back to our cars, a new siren sounded. What's worse is that when you're not inside a bomb shelter, the explosions are VERY LOUD. One explosion sounded like it was right next to me, and my ears rang for a bit. A few others sounded like they were right above my head.

Still, I didn't let it faze me one bit. My smartwatch didn't even register any stress, and it always thinks I'm stressed. And I had to keep updating my incessantly-worrying Jewish mother—who knew I was on the road—the whole time.

By the time it was all over I think I was sat down in the muck for more than 30 minutes, with rain coming down on me the whole time. When I got to my aunt's house, I was so full of mud I made a terrible mess of her floor. Sorry auntie.